A system for electromagnetic communication with a vortex beam concurrently conveys multiple topological charges of orbital angular momentum. The system includes a source, at least one vortex-sensing diffraction grating, and an array of photodetectors. The source generates the vortex beam concurrently conveying a respective number of selected topological charges during each of the time intervals. The selected topological charges for each time interval are selected from a set of available topological charges. The selected topological charges for each time interval encode a symbol of data. The vortex-sensing diffraction grating combines a vortex phase pattern and a linear phase pattern. The vortex sensing diffraction grating produces a diffraction pattern from diffracting the vortex beam received from the source. The array of photodetectors detects portions of the diffraction pattern and from the detected portions recovers the selected topological charges encoding the symbol of each time interval.